


woven

by spookykingdomstarlight



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, F/F, Hair Braiding, Hoth, Minor Alderaan Feels, Pre-Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-06 00:16:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12805470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookykingdomstarlight/pseuds/spookykingdomstarlight
Summary: Jyn’s stomach twisted up, bile rising in her throat. She’d have to have been a complete insensitive—not outside of the realms of possibility, at least according to Cassian, who liked to pretend he was an authority on sensitivity to other people’s feelings—to not understand the implication. Braids were important on Alderaan. They indicated so much about a person’s status, their relationships. Braids weren’t just a functional style to Leia. They were an expression of something greater.





	woven

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).



It wasn’t that Jyn hadn’t experienced awful circumstances before. With the Partisans, she’d fought in mud and lived in tents on forest worlds and been shot at, stabbed, and blown back in explosions. So the base on Hoth shouldn’t have bothered her. In fact, in most ways, it didn’t. At least the hallways made sense and she knew exactly where to go when the alarms went off. It wasn’t always so organized in Saw’s various caves. And she could admire that. Really, she could.

But sometimes…

 _All_ the time…

It was too kriffing cold. Of all of the places she’d been, none had been as awful as this one. Desolate, freezing, boring. Hoth had it all and more. Leia might have saved her life, but she still felt that Leia owed her for dragging her here of all places. Whatever she’d done in her life—and she’d done a lot of things, some of them not so very good—she didn’t deserve this.

That it didn’t seem to affect Leia beyond a slight reddening of her nose and cheeks only managed to irk Jyn even more. It made her look cute. Jyn just felt like some kind of creaking ice creature plodding around like a rusty, old droid.

Blowing on her hands, she stamped her feet and swiped her hand over the panel to grant her entrance. A little bit of snow still clung to her boots and as much as Leia might annoy her with her general cheerfulness in spite of living in a giant base carved out of the ice, she didn’t want to track any more of it into her quarters than necessary. It already felt like the rug-covered floors where constantly soggy with chilled water; she didn’t need to add to it. She counted out five beats and smiled almost reluctantly when it beeped, preparing to unlock.

Leia was ever Leia.

Even safely ensconced in the deepest reaches of the base, she verified her visitors’ identities. Even knowing that Jyn was coming off of patrol and would immediately come to her quarters, she maintained the highest standards of security that protocol required of her. She might have hated it, but she followed every last one required of her—except when her friends were in trouble. And when someone needed help. Or when she felt it was right to do otherwise. So, mostly she never followed orders, but when she could, she did.

Perhaps that was why Mon Mothma and Dodonna and Ackbar allowed her out of their sights throughout the day. She knew when to push and when to bow to the requests of others. Given how poorly she behaved in those circumstances, she suspected it was a lesson she’d only learned recently.

It was one that Jyn had never learned at all.

It was only the best of luck that kept her from being given a security detail the way she’d had back when she was first hauled in by the Rebellion. Sure, Cassian was too busy these days to trail after her and make sure she didn’t do anything untoward, but there were plenty of others still who could’ve been saddled with the Rebellion’s second most infamous trouble maker.

The door finally slid open and the smile that formed wasn’t even a little bit reluctant now. Heat from the room billowed into the hallway and brushed across her face. Feeling better already, she stepped inside and looked about. Leia was nowhere in sight. At first, Jyn wondered if there was a malfunction in the room that let her in, but then she actually thought about it. No, of course that wouldn’t happen. Maybe in the barracks or some of the smaller dormitories that the rest of the base shared. But not in the private quarters Leia kept even though she’d fought against her exclusion from the same requirements that other people were forced to deal with.

“Leia?” she called, stepping gingerly. This was, in all the ways that mattered, her second home. Though she had her own quarters elsewhere, she spent so much time here, most people knew this would be the easier place to look for and find her. And yet, she spent so long without a place of her own that she still occasionally felt like an intruder. “Are you here?”

There was the sound of a thud and then Leia’s head poked out of the ‘fresher. Her cheeks were even pinker than normal and her eyes gleamed. Her hair was loose, a surprise despite how often now Jyn had actually seen it down. She still expected braids and buns and every manner of up-do that Jyn was incapable of recreating with her own hair. Sometimes, when it was just Jyn and Leia and they had nowhere to be, Leia would practice different braiding techniques on Jyn’s hair. She would talk about where it had come from, how she’d originally learned it. Usually, it was her mother who’d been responsible. Sometimes, it was another woman who was so much stardust thanks to the weapon Jyn’s father helped create.

Jyn always removed the braids before venturing out of Leia’s quarters again, her hair a little bit wavier than before, but even once they were gone, she remembered the feel of Leia’s fingers in her hair. They carded soothingly across her skull, soft and sure and easy with long muscle memory. Even now though, Jyn could recall exactly what it felt like.

“You’re just in time,” Leia said instead of _hello_ or _how are you_ or any of the things she might have said instead. But that was Leia through and through. She didn’t always have time for niceties when she had a goal in mind. And clearly she had one in mind now. Grinning, she stepped out from behind the ‘fresher door and strode toward Jyn, heedless of the fact that she was merely wearing a robe, still a little damp from the shower she’d taken. “A little past time actually.”

Another upside of being a princess. You got genuine water showers.

That was one thing Jyn was perfectly happy to take advantage of.

“I’m so sorry, Princess,” she said, droll. Occasionally Leia made it entirely clear that she was a royal, demanding and full of impatience when things didn’t go her way. Jyn mostly loved that about her, how she so rarely fell into line, but occasionally it made her want to tease the woman before her. How easy it was for her to issue demands. How easy, in turn, it was for Jyn to give her a hard time. “Next time, I’ll tell the general that I’d rather not take my shift, thank you very much. Princess Leia’s orders.” But though she joked, she smiled and met Leia halfway. “Not that I’d mind skiving off from guarding the base’s perimeters.”

Jyn would always do it, even though she hated it. Sometimes, knowing that about herself scared her, but right now, still cold from the unrelentingly frigid weather of Hoth, she couldn’t do better than to take Leia’s face in her hands and laugh as Leia ducked away, gasping in surprise as the icicles that had once been Jyn’s fingers touched her. She did this every time and yet Leia allowed it, welcomed it even, because she immediately ducked in and pressed a kiss against Jyn’s mouth. Leia wasn’t always so demonstrative, but Jyn relished those rare moments when she allowed herself to be unguarded enough to do something the least bit playful.

“Sure,” Leia replied. “That will definitely go over well.” She jerked her head toward the bed, getting just the right idea as far as Jyn was concerned. If anything would warm her up, it was an hour or two under the covers with Leia. “Come on, take a seat.”

“Demanding.”

“Asking,” Leia said, “always. Please?”

Jyn, a suspicious person by nature, but even more suspicious when Leia was being sweet to her, narrowed her eyes and shook her head. “What? Why?” She didn’t take a step back, but she thought about it. “What do you want?”

“I need your help,” she replied.

“That’s not an answer.” But though Jyn was dubious, she couldn’t actually bring herself to deny Leia anything. So she went where she was asked to go and sat.

At least she wasn’t asked to go to Jedha this time. Or Eadu. Or Hoth.

Leia’s bed in contrast was quite a bit more pleasant, even if it wasn’t for the reason she might have originally wanted to be there. Curious, she looked up at Leia as she turned and freed the bits of her hair that were trapped beneath the robe. Shaking her head, her hair fell in a smooth, sheened wave down her back. It was so much longer than it seemed normally. It still came as a surprise to her to see it so.

“I want you to help,” Leia finally said.

“Oh, no,” Jyn replied. “I’m not very good at stuff like that.” In fact, she didn’t know how to do it at all. Not even after all this time spent watching Leia or having Leia do it to her. She raised her hands as though to fend off an attack. “I’ll just ruin it.”

Leia huffed and blew a few curling strands of her hair out of her eyes. “You won’t ruin anything. I’d just—like to share this with you.”

Jyn’s stomach twisted up, bile rising in her throat. She’d have to have been a complete insensitive—not outside of the realms of possibility, at least according to Cassian, who liked to pretend he was an authority on sensitivity to other people’s feelings—to not understand the implication. Braids were important on Alderaan. They indicated so much about a person’s status, their relationships. Braids weren’t just a functional style to Leia. They were an expression of something greater.

Leia had no one to share that part of herself with. And she’d tried already without asking. Now, she _was_ asking.

And Jyn could do nothing except nod, sick to her stomach at the thought of disappointing Leia further.

“Will you show me at least?” Jyn asked, nervous for reasons she couldn’t even begin to articulate. It was ridiculous to imagine Leia getting mad or laughing at her for failing. “Something easy?”

Leia’s grin turned soft and fond and so loving that Jyn’s stomach flipped for entirely new reasons. “We’ll work up to something more complicated,” she agreed. Plopping down in front of Jyn, her legs stretched out before her and crossed at the ankles, she tilted her head up and looked into Jyn’s eyes from what must have been the most uncomfortable angle imaginable. “Watch what I do.”

What she did was use her fingers to dance through her own hair, quickly and efficiently separating the strands into distinct portions. Of all the things Jyn had learned how to do over the years, this might just end up being the hardest. “My mother taught me,” she said. “This was the very first one she showed me how to do.” She laughed lightly undoing all her hard work as she brushed it back out.

Jyn wondered if her own mother would have shown her anything similar had they not been parted so cruelly by Imperials and her own foolish belief that she could hide her family from the Empire forever. Perhaps her mother knew even less about braiding hair than she did; it was simply one ore thing Jyn would never get to know about her mother. There were vague memories of her father playing with her hair. Perhaps he might have known.

But she couldn’t ask him either now, could she?

Tucking her legs beneath her, she reached for the silky soft strands of Leia’s hair. They slipped, cool like water, between Jyn’s fingertips. Instead of showing what courage she could, she delayed the inevitable for a few moments. Just to enjoy the touch. And to allow Leia to enjoy it.

It wasn’t often that Leia allowed this kind of intimacy.

The fact that she let Jyn do it despite knowing it was probably going to turn out looking like bantha poodoo on Jyn’s part was just the icing on a very guilt-laden cake.

“Okay.” Jyn drew in a deep breath. As much as she would have loved to put off making a fool of herself forever, she knew she could only put it off for so long before her legs fell asleep or Leia decided it was a bad idea to ask this of Jyn and called the whole thing off. “So what do I do here anyway?”

A little awkwardly, Leia brought her hands back to cover Jyn’s. It wasn’t ideal—and Jyn was left wondering if there was a better way—but Leia did manage to show her the motions. As she talked Jyn through it, Jyn even thought it was possible she’d be able to pull it off.

That was… at least until she had to do it for herself and all that silky soft, cool water strands of hair slipped right through her fingers and out of the braid that she tried to put them into. Unlike Leia, who managed to keep each chunk neat and tidy, Jyn only succeeded in watching it all fall apart.

She huffed and brushed Leia’s hair out one more time. She could do this. She _would_ do this.

If she could handle every sort of blaster that landed in her lap, she could braid Leia’s hair.

This time, it went a little better. It didn’t look quite as even or as pretty as Leia’s. In fact, it looked fairly tortured, with stray bits of hair poking out of the sides as the entirety . Leia patted at the resulting mess and moved as though she intended to get up, like she was satisfied with the shoddy job Jyn had done.

That would not stand.

Pressing her hand against Leia’s shoulder, she said, “No, wait. Let me try again.”

Leia turned and looked at her. “You’re sure?”

Jyn nodded. She was sure. Very definitely so.

Jyn Erso never did anything she didn’t mean.

And if learning how to braid hair as good as Leia did was what she had to do, she’d do it.


End file.
